CHAPTER XV

TECHNICAL REQUISITES FOR THE TRANSPORTATION OF GOODS ^1;2

For the existence of commerce as an independent occupation, specific technological conditions are prerequisite. In the first place there must be regular and reasonably reliable transport opportunities. One must, to be sure, think of these in the most primitive possible terms through long ages. Not only in the Assyrian and Babylonian times were inflated goat skins used for the diagonal crossing of rivers, but even in the Mohammedan period, skin-bag boats long dominated the river traffic.

On land the trader had recourse far into the middle ages to primitive transport media. The first was his own back, on which he carried his goods down to the 13th century; then pack animals or a two wheeled cart drawn by one or at the most two horses, the merchant being restricted to commercial routes as roads in our sense are not to be thought of. Only in the east and in the interior of Africa does caravan trade with slaves as porters appear to occur fairly early. In general even there, the pack animal is the rule. The typical animal of the south is the ass or the mule; the camel does not appear until late, in the Egyptian monuments, and the horse still later; it was originally used for war and found application in the transport of goods only in more recent times.

Traffic by sea had to make use of equally primitive means of transportation. In antiquity, and likewise in the early middle ages, the boat propelled by oars was the rule. The construction we must picture as very clumsy; we find mention of the cords with which the plank boats had to be held together or they would break apart. It is true that sailing goes back so far that its invention cannot be determined, but it was not sailing in the sense that the term now bears. Originally it served only for supplementing the oars when winds were favorable, while tacking against the wind seems to have been still unknown in the early middle ages. The Eddas contain only a doubtful reference to it and it is doubtful whether the first use of tacking is to be ascribed to Andrea Doria as medieval tradition had it. From Homer and still later sources we learn that the ships were not so large but that they could be pulled up on the beach when a landing was made each evening. The anchor evolved very slowly in antiquity, from a heavy stone to an instrument in the form customary today. Shipping was at first, of course, purely coastal traffic; deep-sea navigation is an innovation of the Alexandrian period and was based on the observation of the monsoon. The Arabs first ventured to try to reach India by allowing it to drive them across over the open sea. Nautical instruments for determining location are among the Greeks the most primitive imaginable. They consisted of the odometer, which in the manner of a sand glass allowed balls to fall whose number indicated the miles passed over, and the “bolis” for determining the depth. The astrolabe is an invention of the Alexandrian period and not until that time were the first lighthouses established.

Shipping in the middle ages, like that of the Arabs, remained technically far behind Chinese practice. The magnetic needle and mariner’s compass which were applied as early as the third and fourth centuries in China, were not known in Europe until a thousand years later. After the introduction of the compass in the Mediterranean and Baltic seas it is true that a rapid development began. However, a fixed steering rudder behind the ship was not universal until the 13th century. Rules of navigation were a trade secret. They were objects of bargaining down to the days of the Hansards who in this connection became champions of progress. The decisive forward steps were the advances in nautical astronomy, made by the Arabs and brought by the Jews to Spain, where in the 13th century Alfonso X had the tables prepared which are known by his name. Compass maps were first known from the 14th century. When at that time the western world took up ocean navigation, it was confronted by problems which for the time being it had to solve with very primitive means. For astronomical observations the pole star offered in the north a tolerably secure basing point while in the south the Cross long served for orientation. Amerigo Vespucci determined longitude by the position of the moon. At the beginning of the 16th century its determination by clocks was introduced, these having been so far perfected that it was possible to determine longitude approximately by measuring the difference between their time and that shown by the sun at midday. The quadrant by which latitude could readily be determined seems to have been first used in 1594. The speed of ships corresponded to all these conditions. There was an extraordinary change on the introduction of sailing in contrast with the row boat. Yet in antiquity the stretch of sea from Gibraltar to Ostia required from eight to ten days, and the stretch from Messina to Alexandria about as long. After the English developed effective sailing methods in the 16th and 17th centuries, there were sailing ships which were not so far behind moderately fast steamers, . although their speed was always dependent upon the wind.